The Top 7... Little heroes in big worlds

Honey, we shrunk the protagonist

Did we say Psychonauts was terminally ignored? Okami had to suffer not one, but two worldwide shrugs at retail, first on PS2 in 2006, then again this year on Wii. We, like everyone else who bothered,loved it, but despite such strong affection, thousands of players may not have made it all the way to the end. If you didn’t (and stopped after beating Orochi like some of us at GR), you missed Amaterasu being zapped to microbe-size to enter a sick emperor and beat the illness out of him.

You don’t see much in the way of new environments, or even a new take on old places you’ve already seen, but the trip itself is quite memorable:

Witness! Amaterasu change from proud wolf to pinkie toe runt!

See! Booger-sized Issun in his true form!

Watch! The god-dog shrink small enough to enter someone’s body!

View! Ammy and Issun take control of the emperor from within!

It’s one thing to simply reduce your size – it’s quite another to shrink down so small you can comfortably fit inside a human being. Note that this is different from fighting something that is naturally larger than you, as in Shadow of the Colossus or the whale in Kingdom Hearts.

If you like warding off ill-meaning monsters from inside other people’s guts, attempt to suffer through Final Fantasy Legend II, where you’re magically shrank and injected into Ki, a girl who’s been invaded by... things. See that map up there? That’s her!

If you dare, observe how lucky you kids today are with your full-color portable systems:

Katamari kinda-sorta breaks the rule a bit, as you’re not always small, nor are you always large. You start out quite tiny, but as you collect more and more junk for your soon-to-be celestial body, the katamari grows to planet-size and beyond.

Before you begin absorbing the cosmos, you have to start small:

Cluttered stairwells!

Cluttered restaurants!

Cluttered closets!

Cluttered store shelves!

So, what’s the most annoying tiny thing that could kill you? Well, you can’t really “die” in Katamari games, but anything that’s one goddam nanometer larger than your katamari will stop you dead in your tracks, bouncing off and shaking loose a bunch of the random crap you’d collected. Not death, no, but far more obnoxious.

Need more crudely rendered Japanese people to harass? Mister Mosquito lets you suck a whole family dry with your ace-insect skills.

Now what could possibly be better than all the rest of these entries? Hm...